Maintaining an excellent credit score is key to qualifying for loans and mortgages, so making your monthly payments on time for credit cards, car loans and mobile phone contracts are of utmost importance. But what happens if one payment falls through? Will this have any adverse repercussions?

Answering this question depends on three primary factors: your payment history and current credit report structure. If your payment history has been generally strong with only occasional missteps resulting in dropped scores, one missed payment could significantly diminish them.

If your telecom bill — such as landline or mobile phones, internet and cable TV services — is paid within 30 days, it should not have any major effects on your credit scores. However, if payments become 60 or more days late then providers may report this fact to the credit bureaus, potentially impacting scores negatively.

If you are more than 90 days late with payments, your credit scores could drop up to 180 points, depending on your payment history and length of time behind. On the plus side, however, late payment information only accounts for 35% of credit scores so the impact may not be as dramatic.

As long as you make future payments on time, the effects of late payments usually fade over time. No matter how your scores respond to this delay in payments, your best course of action should be to get back on track quickly.